LESLIE MOODY CASTRO: Can you explain your choice of title, “Ex-Voto”? Specifically, how do the story of The Barragán Archives and the work The Proposal operate in tandem with one another?

JILL MAGID: The Barragán Archives, which I began in 2013, is an extended, multimedia project examining of the legacy of Luis Barragán. At the core of the project is the question of artistic legacy: how it is constructed, manipulated, accessed, and controlled. In ideal circumstances, artistic legacy is shared, as a gift. The Proposal is a climactic artwork within The Barragán Archives project that includes a genuine diamond produced from the cremated remains of Luis Barragán, set into an engagement ring, and offered to Federica Zanco, Director of the Barragan Foundation, in exchange for the return of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and the public.

“Ex-Voto” ran concurrent to The Proposal’s exhibition in Switzerland, and its title refers to the series of four works I am showing within the exhibition. Collectively called The Miracles, each Ex-Voto is a cast tin horse painted by a professional ex-voto painter that I hired in Mexico City, whom I provided with images and texts. Ex-voto literally means, “from the vow made,” or “according to the promise I made.” The Barragán Archives is the result of many years’ worth of research and engagement, meaningful relationships, and forged partnerships and the ex-votos I made offer gratitude to those inspiring collaborations, our shared commitments, and to what I believe to be their miraculous outcomes.

A votive offering is a gift for the dead, intended to be buried with them, and not to be recouped by the living. An ex-voto, like a legacy, remains in the realm of the living.

How is this exhibition either mimicking the process of an ex-voto or acting as a metaphor for it?

To make The Proposal, and to do the necessary work and research of The Barragán Archives (of which this work is a part) required, I collaborated and partnered with many people and institutions, including the Barragán family, art organizations, non-profit organizations, government bodies, lawyers, professors, architects, and more. I wanted to make a work that would thank these partners, these bodies, for their collaboration and for our various relationships that grew from our collaborations. Together, we expanded our understandings of legacy and how it can be lived, and activated. Traditional ex-votos offered a beautiful form for gratitude, and they inspired my own versions of them.

You’ve talked about this project in terms of a love triangle in your exhibitions “Woman With Sombrero,” at Art in General in 2013, Yvon Lambert in 2014, and MAZ in 2014. Can you describe this role?

It is important to me that my work goes beyond metaphor, engaging the law and structures of control in both its finished form as well as through the process of creation. I believe that an understanding of how artistic legacy is constructed, shaped, manipulated, and shared is an important cultural issue. I don’t see art or an archive as a fixed or dead body, but as something alive and that continues to give. That’s not inevitable: to do so, it must be kept alive by remaining accessible, with the possibility for continual engagement. 

An artist’s work is complete at their death, but their legacy is in its infancy. I’m trying to understand Barragán and his legacy. And my effort to understand myself in relation to them is part of the work of The Barragán Archives, which I explored in the exhibition “Woman With Sombrero,” and others. While I was not permitted to see Barragán’s professional archive at the Barragán Foundation in Switzerland, I was given full access to his personal archive at Casa Barragán in Mexico City. Much of the first few years of the project grew from my research and hands-on exploration of the personal archive, and my inability to access the professional archive.

You have traditionally worked with systems of surveillance and loopholes in laws, as in the Failed States project (2012). Why did you decide to focus on Barragán and his legacy?

My work has continued to center around themes of access, power and the law since I first started showing in 1999. Before The Barragán Archives, I’d mainly engaged with government institutions such as CCTV operations, police, and secret services. With The Barragán Archives, I entered into a new territory of privatized power. I wanted to understand what it meant for an artist’s legacy to be controlled by Vitra, a corporation. To do so, I needed to engage with copyright law, intellectual property rights, and fair use doctrine.

I’ve explored questions around artistic legacy within my work before. Auto Portrait Pending (2005), is a work that confronts my own legacy, by way of my physical body and its relationship to the art market. To make the work, I signed a contract with a company to become a diamond when I die, which will be set in a gold ring. Until the diamond′s creation, the artwork exists only of the empty ring setting, the corporate contract, and a series of documents. While The Proposal takes on a similar form — a diamond with attendant paperwork — it does so in a very different context, with a different intention. The Proposal is a gift, intended to inspire another gift: the repatriation of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and its free accessibility to the public. 

There have been some criticisms of the project. Can you speak openly about this? And was it simply fascination that led to a genuine offer of the ring to Ms. Zanco?

Yes, I am always looking for opportunities in my work to directly engage systems of power, and to find the human core within a seemingly impenetrable system. In this case I found a powerful artist’s legacy that is constricted by corporate power.

Yet The Proposal is created and offered as a gift. It is both an artwork and a potential tool of negotiation. The ring avoids the market completely by not being for sale; it is non-transactional and therefore opens up the possibility of lasting relationships created by the act of gift exchange. The ring may only be exchanged for the return and public access to the archive.

Gift-giving is the transfer of property rights over particular objects. Property is not a thing, but a relationship among people through things. In order to remain alive, an artist’s legacy must be shared, experienced, and open. Offering the ring to Ms. Zanco is an opportunity to bring Barragán’s legacy out of private control and back to the commons.

What would happen after the archive is returned to Mexico? Where would it live, is there a plan?

As stated in The Family Agreement, a contract between the family and myself, about The Proposal:

The Artwork will exist in two periods: the proposal period and the engagement period. The Artwork will be displayed during both periods, as described in The Agreement.

The Artist will offer the Ring to the Archivist, in Switzerland, at the first exhibition of the Artwork. This offer will initiate the proposal period. In order for the Archivist to receive the Ring, she must agree to relocate the Archive from the Barragan Foundation, in Birsfelden, Switzerland, to a publicly accessible site or institution in Mexico. The Archivist may accept the Ring and the terms of the offer at any moment.

If the Archivist accepts the offer, the Family, the Archivist, and other relevant parties will negotiate the terms of the Archive’s relocation.

As you see from the contract, once The Archivist (Ms. Zanco) accepts The Proposal, she, the family and other relevant parties will negotiate a publicly accessible site in Mexico. This may be a library or a university, or similar, or perhaps even a new building built specifically for it. There are many possibilities.

The post “My work goes beyond metaphor”: A Conversation with Jill Magid appeared first on artcritical.

The church bells chime on the hour and Raftery is pressed for time. At completion, the show will consist of 12 16-inch tondo paintings and a portfolio of 12 earthenware plates with transfer prints from Raftery’s engravings. Each plate depicts a solitary, middle-aged man, (the artist) working with great determination in an ornamental garden, chronicling every month of the year and his corresponding duties in the garden from inception to fruition, decline to dormancy. In January we see him in his bed reading seed catalogs, in March he is watering, in April digging out the lettuce bed. Cut to November and he’s taking out the dahlia tubers. Lastly, in December, he’s standing in the snow contemplating the next year’s planting.

The depth and wit of the narrative are conveyed with concise lines on luminous glazed and dynamically shaped plates. These will be displayed against thematically-coordinated wallpaper so that a complete world is presented through mastery of narrative detail and marvelous skill. There is both satire and profundity, and the lone gardener’s Promethean toil in his small but precious plot reminds us of our own struggle against time and the elements. But while contemplating the smallness and beauty of our single lives, the appreciative viewer might not fully grasp the extensive process behind this artistry; the number of people and inventions cultivated for this project: that ink was formulated, ceramic glazes invented, original plate shapes created and named, and wallpaper designed and printed. And then, of course, there’s the work of tending the garden, and it’s most important collaborator, the artist’s mother.

MARY JONES: You’ve said your title, “The Autobiography of a Garden” refers to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, because in that work Stein uses Toklas’s voice to describe their shared lives. To me, there many Alices in this project, including the garden itself, which belongs to your mother. Unlike the garden, she remains unseen throughout the project. What’s the relationship?

ANDREW RAFTERY: I started the garden for her, as a subject for her work. She’s a wonderful artist and she makes expressionist paintings of the flowers. At first, I just planted things I knew she would like to paint. She’s done so many paintings year after year of the garden, and it’s through her work that I remember and see it, more vivid than any photograph could ever be. In a way, her work completes the project and that’s always in the background. Even though she doesn’t appear in the work, she’s always there, and the sweetness of the time we’ve we’ve had together really comes through, because it’s her garden, too, and she absolutely adores it.

I hear she’s not alone in her appreciation?

Sometimes my mother wakes up in the morning to see people touring the back yard. Providence is a very friendly place and doing a garden in a neighborhood like this becomes a very public practice, something you do as much for your neighbors as for yourself. People change their route from work so they can see what’s going on in the garden. They’re always calling out to me from their cars and making comments to me as they drive by. When they see me out there with the easel it’s especially fascinating to them.

Your earlier work always took place indoors, in upscale malls where strangers evaluate each other and interact during commerce. In “Suit Shopping” and “Open House,” you critiqued social status through invented narratives transpiring in these semi-public spaces; the prurient curiosity of potential buyers at an open house, or the sly flirtations and homoeroticism of a man measured while suit shopping. But in “The Autobiography of a Garden,” you’ve moved outside, to a personal place of your own design, and you’re the only person depicted.

I think for the first time I wanted to put the lens of critique entirely on myself, and what’s emerged from this new work is a different kind of emotional tone. I’ve always thought of my work as satirical, but I don’t know if this project is anymore, it takes the risk of having a charge that’s a little bit deeper, a different kind of theme to it, that’s surprised me. I’ve always appeared in my pieces as a kind of witness, to show that this is a world that I know and whatever critique is in that world can be directed at me, too. I think the way I do it is fairly eccentric and relates very much to the way I make my art, the kind of planning and imagination that I bring to the garden overlaps with what goes into planning a print or any of my work, and it’s unlike anything else I’ve done before.

One of the most striking things upon entering your studio are all these models that you create for observational painting, part of your classical approach. Do you consider them artworks?

I don’t know yet, they’re so personal, after all, it’s me naked. I’ve shown the models that I made for “Open House,” but I’m not sure about these yet. Actually, the thing about them is compared to my other work they’re a bit provisional, I only take them as far as I need for the drawings.

I enjoy how they’re so loose and have so much vitality.

That’s what makes them so much fun to draw. The great thing about the models is they give me distance both from myself as a subject, but also the physical distance that I need to take from the figure, which is very different from anything I could do otherwise. It really helps.

Do you undergo the same process for every single image? Did you have to make a model for the painting of you in bed?

There are nine images with models. Actually, for an image in bed, I stuffed the bed with a dummy of myself which is the creepiest photo, but that’s how I did the drapery on the bed.

So you work from a photograph to make the models? Who takes the photos?

I do it myself. The photos in the garden are very specific to establish the scale.

Working from the photograph to the model, then from the model to painting allows a lot of slippage and infusion of expression, a facture that’s outside the photographic, or realism. Are you purposely creating a character for yourself?

The issue of self-consciousness is really central for me, to try to create figures that are not seemIngly conscious of being watched or posing. It’s very important to the tone of the narrative itself. If I can achieve that, the work becomes less theatrical.

Is the characterization revealing for you?

That’s why I do it. Here’s’ a project that’s so super-crafted, so super planned, and then there’s this by-product that surprises me.

What is important to you about your extensive process?

I’m inventing these images, they haven’t existed before, and as I go through each step the image becomes more believable to me, and more memorable. When I think about visual narrative, I think about what’s possible to show in a handmade still image that’s separate from a film or novel, and depicting very particular external details to reveal character and content is something I’ve always been interested in, and what led me to Stein’s writing. One of the things about engraving is that there’s no fudging allowed, you have to know where every single mark is going to be, so I need to know my subject thoroughly. I begin with the form of the body in sculpture, insert that into a grisaille painting of the landscape done from life to get the tonal structure and detail, and then I trace that onto acetate for the engraving.

Is the particular time of day relevant to each piece?

Yes. Each one tries to use the particular light of that time of year. For example, In February I’m using the kind of light that comes into my kitchen from a particular angle that is the never the same in other months. There’s a washed out light in August, the dog days of an overcast day. These things are very important to me.

It’s significant that you’ve returned to painting after such a long hiatus. What brought it back?

I can clearly remember when I stopped painting. It was during on my first sabbatical in 2001, I was working on a self-portrait my kitchen amongst the transferware. It was an oil painting and I was detailing the images on the plates. And I just thought, “I’m so sick of this.” That painting remains unfinished. At that point I turned to the engravings for “Suit Shopping,” I was so happy to be working with engraving because it had a natural simplicity to it, a necessary stylization that didn’t allow for all that detail. So, it was with trepidation that I turned to painting again. It was through the back door, in a way because it’s in black and white Flashe, and very close to what I do in drawing. I thought that this would actually help, as there’s a limitation to the kind of modeling I could do, and I wouldn’t be tempted to go as far as I would in oil painting. But the funny thing is that it’s come full circle. Just in June, I finished the kitchen painting, and as I sat there working on it, I thought this was the same painting I was doing when I decided to quit painting because there I am doing a self-portrait of myself in my bathrobe surrounded by all this transferware. I think it’s exciting that I picked up where I left off and found a new way to make it satisfying. When I quit painting, it was because I felt the drive towards a greater and greater verisimilitude and realism, a kind of smoothing out, which felt like a conservative impulse. I need to make it clear that my images are constructed fictions.

The transferware has made a transition from the background of your kitchen to the actual ground for the engraving. You and your partner, Ned Lochaya, are avid collectors. What’s your attraction?

Transferware for me has been a lifelong thing. As a child, my family had a set of Johnson Brothers pink transferware and I really loved it. I loved setting the table with it because there’s nothing like eating dinner and looking at a picture. I remember I took that set with me to graduate school, that’s how much I liked it. Then, once while admiring the big 19th-century brown transferware on the dinner table of print historian Richard S. Field, he said, “You know these are really prints.” That was a revelation to me. I started to think of transferware differently. Shortly thereafter, Ned started accumulating a collection that is now at about 1,500 pieces. That’s a lot of anything, but we live with it and use it all the time, and I also look at it as a print collection. Our collection goes to about 1850, but there are other artists who’ve done printed pottery in my collection, like Claire Leighton, who’s been very important to me.

Can you talk about the shapes and designs of your plates?

Of course, the big question for someone who’s never designed ceramics before, is what are you going to use? At first, I explored the idea of finding a potter who would design the shapes for me or use things that already existed. But then I saw that I could use paper, which I know really well, to invent my designs. So I started to play with tag board, and by using something that straightforward I could come up with many different solutions. It was so generative, I could refer to Victorian forms, which like mine are also often based on 6, 12, or 24 parts, or I could just use geometry to develop brand new shapes.

And once you had the design, how did you make the plates?

The pottery production has been an absolute saga in itself, and fortunately for me, Larry Bush, professor of ceramics here at RISD, has taken the project on. He really likes the plate shapes, which is a true compliment to me, and he figured out the production method, which is to use a hydraulic press with two part plaster molds. He also invented a special clay for the project, made entirely out of American materials. It’s a beautiful white earthenware, and people who know these things find it to be very close to a beautiful white 18th clay that Wedgwood once made, and he came up with the creamy clear glaze. He’s been super involved every step of the way.

And the engraving?

Just how to get an engraving onto the ceramic was also a dilemma. Millions and millions of pieces were produced in the 19th century in England, but that industry is really gone. I had really hard time finding any concrete factual information about the process.

I’m very surprised this information is lost, were you?

Wedgwood and Spode are closed, that industry is gone. There’s one factory left as a kind of heritage thing from what I understand. Industrial techniques are so vulnerable to loss.

Studio techniques are constantly being taught to new people through art schools and atelier practices, but when you’re dealing with assembly lines and everybody just knowing a little piece of the process, and with proprietary methods and materials, once it’s gone it’s very difficult to reconstruct. I called my friend in England, Paul Scott, author of “Ceramics and Print,” the first edition of his book has a list of resources, and from this list, I started calling people in England. They would say “Well, we don’t do that anymore,” or “We all just all got fired.” I did a lot of research on old patents and also on contemporary materials. We ended up making our own inks, and instead of printing on tissue paper like they did in the past, we used decal paper that’s used for digital transfers. The process brings together 19th-century technology and 21st-century technology.

When did you conceive of the wallpaper to put behind the plates?

When you do an 8-year project, you have many opportunities to talk about it as a work in progress. I knew I didn’t want ornamental borders on the plates, like traditional transferware, but I did understand that these borders function as an opportunity to comment on what’s in the interior. I started thinking about a way to extend the work and began making pattern motifs based on the garden. I looked at an old style of wallpaper, a French style called “Dominos” which allows a patterned ensemble to be created from nine-by-12-inch sheets. Mine is similar and done in letterpress. Doing the wallpaper is what encouraged me to also make the ornamental cartouche for the back stamps with the title and the month of each plate. I’ve always been so dedicated to representation, and working with patterns and geometry has opened up a new world for me.

How did the fanciful names for the plate shapes come about?

The thing I didn’t know about ceramics is that once we press a plate, we have to spend at least half an hour trimming, sanding, and refining each one. When you do 1,500 of them you have to have, first of all, a lot of people to help, and along with the labor and time involved, an intimacy with each shape develops, and all of the forms got names along the way. Larry called the October shape “Fox Points,” because it reminded him of the landscape of the Fox Point neighborhood of Providence, but to me it suggested Chrysthanthemums. The May shape has this sort of lobed form, which is definitely our lettuce shape. I think the most poetic name is for the November shape. One of the assistants began to call it “Swan Wings,” and I think when you look at it just knowing that emphasizes the poignant quality of the waning light of November.

As in your earlier work, time is very specific in the garden, but your character is hard to place. Why?

One thing in my earlier prints that I was really trying to avoid was that sense of reflecting American regional arts and regionalism. That’s why I took on that extreme quotation of 17th-century engraving techniques. Don’t get me wrong, I love American regionalism, I grew up surrounded by it in Washington D.C., but I felt it might be dated, it’s a movement that went out by 1938, and it’s so discredited now, But in this new work, I wasn’t trying to mask it, I really went for it. With the house being from 1929, the way I dress and with the hats I wear it could conceivably be 1945, and then there’s something about the historical character of the neighborhood, and even the style of the garden, that taken all together implies this broad swath of periods. That kind of regionalism was brought into this project, and it’s very new.

Are there political or personal implications for this?

An artist I have been thinking about recently is Grant Wood, and the tragedy of Grant Wood is that he was in the closet. In some ways, Wood’s Daughters of Revolution or Parson Weems’ Fable, are very gay works with a pointed critique from an outsider’s perspective. Some unbelievably humorous things are carefully placed in the paintings, such as the transfer-printed Blue Willow teacup held by one of the aged daughters that is our key to understanding her pretensions. But in some cases, such as the weird interpretation of the George Washington cherry tree myth in the Parson Weems picture, Wood’s meaning remains ambiguous, as if there were some things he could not make explicit. As with Wood, you could see my work as “very gay” in its sensibilities and the avocations depicted, especially in the case of the extended self-portrait in “The Autobiography of a Garden.” But because I don’t have to take on the pressures and prejudices faced by Wood, and have the privilege of being open about who I am, I’m free to use the conventions of American Regionalism to create new subjects. Maybe I’m a little like Grant Wood if he’d been out.

September 10 to November 5, 2016 at 515 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, info@ryanleegallery.com

The post The Autobiography of a Garden: Andrew Raftery in Conversation with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

DARREN JONES: What experiences learned in your earlier days, starting out in the 1980s, are still relevant to your work today? What’s been consistent from then until now?

NANCY WHITENACK: Everything remains surprising to me. When someone walks into the gallery, you cannot ever assume anything about them because of how they look or dress. That they are walking in means that they’re interested in art. Don’t discount people, and treat everyone with respect. I learned that early, and it has always been true. Also, we’ve had so many ups and downs, economically, and even if I’m wondering how the rent is going to be paid, something always catches; I have learned to trust that I can keep going, that I can tighten up, be lean if necessary, but I know that I am going to be able to continue to do this.

In my estimation it’s so little about commerce, it’s really about the artists, and how they create and the ideas that come out of that. It is artists who have sustained me. I work with artists long term, and when I take an artist on I place a great deal of trust in them and what they do, and I learned quickly that I have to take on work that I think is substantial, and interesting. Otherwise how can I show it in good faith, much less find someone to own it?

What are the main changes that you have witnessed during the years in Dallas, and how have they affected the art scene, and art dealing in the city?

When I opened, contemporary art and going to galleries was not something that people did. We had openings, and we’d have people in, but there wasn’t an enthusiastic embrace. Several key points made a difference. Certainly the Rachofsky family, the Roses, and the Hoffmans, who decided to give their collections to the Dallas Museum of Art, made a quantum difference in how people paid attention to the magnanimity of the gifts and material, and that caused people to look more, including at contemporary art.

The Dallas Art Fair has been a boon, not only to the Dallas public but to dealers coming into the city, who discovered that there are amazing collectors here, incredible wealth here, and great art being made here. Also the collaborative groups of artists who finally decided that they cannot sit back and wait for someone to come to them, and so they organize exhibitions and pop-up shows, which have revitalized the whole art scene and have filled it with activity. Several years ago curator Gabriel Ritter did a summer show at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) with a number of these groups, which was really helpful. It was sensational because it brought further attention to what is happening here and signaled to collectors here to look in more depth at what is happening in Dallas.

With all the progress that is being made, is there anything that has been lost, that you would like artists today to experience?

Years ago, a large group of artists used to meet every Saturday morning at Kuby’s Sausage House, and whoever got there grabbed a place at the table. It was a great time to get together, check in and talk. I don’t know if that happens anymore. Today, I get a sense that artists can often feel isolated; beyond the gallery-going they don’t perhaps get that kind of interaction. Frances Bagley, a sculptor, and a group of women would meet regularly for critiques; it’s been documented in a recent DMA show. So if those kinds of things were lost it would affect how artists connect to the community.

CentralTrak, a residency at the University of Texas at Dallas, has enlarged the parameters of what this city is and how artists perceive it. CentralTrak is a place where artists gather, hold panel discussions about artmaking, and talk about the difficulties that artists face. CentralTrak’s success in addressing such issues is down to the director, Heyd Fontenot.

Can you speak about some of the differences between the art scenes in Texas’ major cities and, I have to ask, whether there are any rivalries in their relationships?

Houston has always been the art center in Texas, and it has changed. Bill Davenport, who used to write for Glasstire, came to my gallery one day and said “What is it with you guys? Why is everything going on here?” He’s Houston-based. There was a sense that maybe Houston had lost some ground and that things were just really exploding here. He wanted to know what was making that happen, and we talked about the reasons. I loved that, because we’ve been the banking capital, not the art capital. And that has changed now. San Antonio is a unique city that has some interesting things going on in the art scene.

What I don’t understand is Austin: it has a lot of artists. It has some of the greatest art collections of any university, too, and an art library that puts NYPL’s resources to shame. But there are so few galleries. It is the number one city in terms of the coolest place to go, and for music, but not for visual art. I know why Houston was the art center. It has always had a very integrated sense of the city, in terms of ethnicity and urban development, certainly in terms of city code: a bar sits next to a residence building, sits next to frame shop, next to a church, next to a mausoleum. I think that with so few zoning laws, it made people more tolerant of their neighbors and more open. It causes people to think about how they are going to get along with whatever is happening next door.

In Dallas we are incredibly separated, and constructed to divide neighborhoods. The consequences are that when you go to most any cultural thing, it is predominately white, and that is a tragedy. And that’s got to change. The DMA has changed radically, because of its former director, Bonnie Pitman, who came in initially in the education department and she set about making people feel welcomed there. And if you go on the first Friday night of the month it is packed with a diverse mix of visitors. That’s what has to happen if you want a city that believes in itself and believes in the artists who are here. People have to feel that they are part of the whole. That’s always been on my agenda. Fort Worth is very independent and down-to-earth, and they really support what is going on there without looking to what’s happening in Dallas, although they don’t have many galleries. And of course they have these great museums like the Kimbell and The Fort Worth Modern. 

Is there a sense that an artist needs to leave Texas to gain notice, and has the forming of artist collaboratives arrested the movement of artists out of Dallas?  

Earlier, I would have said yes, if your intentions are to be successful and make a name, you’ve got to go to New York, and find exposure, get in the galleries there. Now, I think that is less the case. The groups of artists that have come together have created a sense of community and a sense that there is something here worth investing in. When you look at artists such as Arthur Peña, Francisco Moreno, Eli Walker, and others, they’re making good tracks, and getting attention. They have stayed right here, and have been self-motivated to make things happen. That’s what it’s about.

Stephen Lapthisophon has been of enormous importance, at the University of Texas at Arlington. He’s mentored a number of people — Jesse Morgan Barnett, Michael Mazurek, among them — who have plugged in right here and are really making things happen. Stephen has been really important in being a mentor, pushing people to get out there and do it. Younger artists have a different sense of who they are, and what the potential is and that anything is possible. You’re here? Dig in! It has fomented a different sense of energy for what is going on in the city.

Then you also have the mid-career artists who galleries and museums need to pay attention to, guys like Jay Sullivan and Robert Barsamian, who have been working hard and doing great work all along. So there is a balance to be found between supporting more established names and newer artists. We’ve just taken on Anthony Sonnenberg, who is fabulous, and I’m very excited about that; we dance with him, but we also have to make sure that we’re putting on really good shows for guys who have been with us for a long time. Making a community happen takes artists who are committed to being here, and doing things that are not commercial and engage us in different ways. And then galleries have to take risks, too. Anything can happen here in Texas: it’s part of the mystique but it’s the truth. And I have seen so many things come together in the last eight to 10 years to promote Dallas as a cultural city.

What do you rely on, recognize or look for in an artist? What tells you that you can work with them? 

I really want them to be decent people! [laughing] Why work with a cad? It’s my good fortune to work with artists who are the most generous people I know. I look for someone who I think is honest and who is willing to give as well as expect us to give. It is a two-way street! It has to also be work that I am stimulated by and causes me to ask questions and want to dig in more.

I want to make sure that one artist doesn’t overlap too much with another, so that each artist has some breathing room in their style or manner and there is nothing that is so close that it becomes uncomfortable. I like things to be distinctive. We have a broad spectrum of artists, and what delights me about that is that you never know what to expect here. I look for artists with a deep sense of craft, and that know how to put elements together. I don’t meant that it has to be meticulous because I also love work that is raw, but I am fascinated by intricacy and when it takes an almost manic energy to make the art happen, I’m very drawn to artists whose work consumes them.

What are you working on now, even outside of gallery exhibitions? What is exciting to you right now?

I stay involved with the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD), of which there are 12 members. I, with others, have been really involved in trying to make the dealer group impact the community in ways that help artists and promote the idea of contemporary art. We do two events a year, one is the CADD FUNd, which is a soup dinner where we invite people to listen to six artists make presentations about projects they want to do that they don’t have money to do. The dinner costs $40, which goes into the pot, and then there is a vote at the end, someone wins, and they take the pot home. That is about engagement, which is important to me. We work at community outreach, we do bus tours to get people into private homes too as a way of looking at how and why people collect art. The LGBT Resource Center has just built a wonderful new building, and it’s been fun to work with artists to donate work to the center.

Community is important to me. These interests are about what a community can be.

The post “Why is everything going on here?”: Nancy Whitenack Talks Dallas Art appeared first on artcritical.

PAUL D’AGOSTINO: As an artist, you very fully identify as a painter, and you very fully imbue your paintings with your identity, but not necessarily with you. Your paintings are not portraits or self-portraits, really, but I see them as portraits of you as a painter. What kind of identity is it that you want your viewers to see? Which Marie is it? It is not simply, “Je suis Marie.“

MARIE PETER-TOLTZ: Walt Whitman says, “I contain multitudes,” and Rimbaud wrote, “Je est un autre.” That would be my answer. Let me be the four billion people I want to be.

Four billion? That’s a suggestive number, a crucial number. It relates to your thoughts about painting as history, this patriarchal aspect of, or backdrop to, painting that we’ve talked about before. It’s a backdrop that is relevant to your work, and to your act of painting, but it doesn’t have to be relevant. Or you don’t have to want it to be. But in a way, you do want it to be. You want to acknowledge that there is a patriarchal history to painting, and to acknowledge that it never goes away as history. But your belief is that it can be transformed in a contemporary setting. In this sense, rather than working against it, you are using the painting process and the imagery to speak through that tradition.

Yes. I am hoping to give the viewer another understanding of painting, taking it outside of these old binaries dividing men and women, or male and female artists. In the same way, I want to challenge the binaries of whether you define yourself as a figurative painter or an abstract painter. I don’t think it belongs to the contemporary artistic conversation, although it is always brought up as an issue. Ultimately, it’s about painting, and hopefully we can go beyond this binary thinking.

My problem with the figurative “versus” the abstract issue in painting is that it is such an old one, and that the conversation is kind of tired, and it’s always blurred, and so there’s not much of substance to say about it.

I agree.

I’m not even sure that it’s still an interesting question. We’re talking about a couple of generalizing adjectives. We can use them to describe an abstract or figurative work. But you already know which it is when you look at it. And how often is it simply both? You can label ‘representational’ a painting that is geometric abstraction, if for example you find out that the triangle in the painting is the artist’s perception of a mountain.

That’s a good example.

How would you describe a still life with a bunch of fruit? Figurative? Or is it not figurative? What if you were to find out that a series of twelve still life paintings of fruit were done before an artist died alone in her studio? Let’s imagine a painter who painted geometric abstraction for decades, but the last twelve paintings she made were these still life paintings of fruit. Is it interesting to say that late in her career, or I guess at the very end, she turns to figuration and representation? Isn’t the genre and subject matter much more compelling, conveying through her final twelve paintings something about life, loneliness and quietude? Maybe that’s not a fair example. Maybe I love fruit far too much.

So here you are bringing out the relevance of autobiographical elements into the artist’s work.

Yes, so maybe it’s not fair. But it does go back to the patriarchal backdrop to painting as we’ve discussed it in your work. If a backdrop is known, if that knowledge is not lost, then it’s there whether you want it or not, whether you agree that it’s relevant or not. If it can inform the viewer, then why not address it? Looking at your paintings, we can certainly acknowledge the biographical elements, which become clearer the longer one looks at the paintings.

In this latest body of work, I was telling a story without a narration. They’re more like the metaphorical landscape of someone’s intimate journey. I am hoping that the viewer is able to enter the painting without having to understand the biographical facts. Narration is something I was doing more of in the past. Narration as a means for painting.

Prose as opposed to verse?

Yes.

So the more you move away from prose, the more you enter the symbolical or more deeply metaphorical realm of poetry.

Maybe more like the difference between a novella and a fictional diary, for example. Maybe something like The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, because it can be opened in the middle and understood.

Pessoa, yes! And this is an interesting idea with regards to painting: looking at a painting as if it’s what you’ve found on the page of a book opened up to wherever, accepting what you are presented with.

In the films from the Nouvelle Vague, the story unravels in a way that each character depends on the other to help the story unfold. With this exhibition, the personnage principal is a satellite for the others. Jean-Luc Godard or Philippe Garrel would choose actors organically, depending on their relationship with one another. Once I had my lead actrice in one of the paintings, I could continue and make the others. I struggled to find her.

Which painting was it? Or which actrice?

L’Éternel Féminin. My female yellow Christ.

One thing I find quite remarkable in the show is how challenging your colors are.

I know!

They’re very difficult colors to deal with or even imagine in successful paintings. A huge yellow painting. A huge orange painting. Not easy. In your works, I gravitate more toward those with darker palettes. But when I look at the others, I don’t come away with the sensation that I was looking at the big yellow one, or the big orange one. They engage the viewer on a completely different level. The thing I like a lot about your centerpiece painting, Je suis le tigre dans la montagne, is that it remains vague, dreamlike, nocturnal. Its ambiguity makes you want to keep looking and discovering. You keep looking for that thing that is there but isn’t. You have taken the symbolism a step further in that one, and you’re taking the viewer with you by making such a move. We’ve talked about how the mother and the child figures in your work connect to the history of Madonna and Christ representation. But here the mother takes on, or you take on, the image of a tiger. It’s a challenge to your viewer. You have to find the mother to comprehend the child. Going deep enough into this nocturnal landscape allows one to locate a history. You’re taking the symbolism further into the realm of poetry.

This is what I wanted. Once I could get away from the word ‘mother’ in this one, or the obvious “mother” figure, then I felt I could convey her more honestly. How was I to communicate this? It was difficult. And ultimately, who is our audience?

With whom do you communicate in your work?

Oh, I don’t know. With myself, to begin with, and with history. This isn’t unique. It is probably true for all artists or writers. In some way, we would like to communicate as an echo that goes both ways, forward and backward. As creative agents, we are using the backdrop of the things we have absorbed in the past to reverberate something new into the future. We want to absorb, convey, transform. Echoes.

Or we transform ourselves, then even the viewers, in some capacity. My paintings can be like my creation of transformation through painting.

These paintings transform you?

I think so.

This must be something you have been thinking about for a while. How do you imagine a painting can change a feeling of self?

By expelling oneself onto the canvas.

So let’s imagine that I have been doing self-portraits for a decade, and then one day I come to the realization that I don’t recognize myself in these representations. I realize I want to convey my “self,” not myself. And perhaps I decide that my “self” is a very small turtle. So I start painting my ‘self’ as such, and that would transform how I think about myself even outside of the paintings. Is that what you mean?

Yes. And a turtle, how liberating that would be! You have a turtle.

Yes, Cecco. He can be a bit boring, and he’s always stuck in his shell. So yes, I can totally identify with myself as a turtle. But anyway, going back to your idea of being transformed by your paintings, one could say that being transformed by one’s art seems like a dramatic exaggeration, but on the other hand it can be utterly true.

Absolutely.

Someone could think that Painter A is lying by saying, “I so love the material of paint, and when I paint time goes away, and I lose myself in the process,” Etc., but everyone who paints knows that there’s a truth to all of that and can relate to the idea of time flying by, to the love of the material. So in a way, your feelings about the transformational aspects of painting also have this quality of seeming like dramatization or exaggeration, but also being real, actual, true. The more you identify with the transformed aspect of self, the more it becomes metaphorical, and eventually even more transformative.

And more transcendental.

Like passing through something.

Getting away from the literal depiction.

Creating a portrayal, not a portrait. A conveyance.

If you think of wild animals, you think they are dangerous, feral, destructive, but they’re also nurturing and protective. So with the tiger, I’m conveying with paint how it feels to nurture and care while being feral. The allegory of the tiger became an implication and depiction of my ‘self.’

How can you convey “caring” in a painting? Like, without simply portraying ‘caring’ faces or something? That’s a really interesting idea. How can one actually express, in a painting, that one cares? There’s something else there too, because when you really care, you always worry.

I know. I worry about my paintings!

You worry about them, great! It’s invigorating to care and worry. It can make you feel alive. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. But speaking of exaggeration, we’ve talked about your fondness for Baroque art and the Mannerists. What do you find interesting in them?

My inspirations are fluid and constantly changing, from my painter friends to Michelangelo! But I did live in Vienna, so the Baroque churches and the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s collection certainly impacted my aesthetic, even subconsciously.

A major element in Baroque art is the attempt to convey, materially, transcendence. Baroque uses exaggerated details, decoration and exuberance to suggest that things can transcend. Is that what inspires you?

Yes. And the fullness, the rich colors, the general intensity of Baroque paintings has always inspired me.

The colors, yes. On that note, why is your “yellow painting” yellow?

If you are interested in the psychology of colors, yellow connects to hope and joy. So that painting is “the hopeful female crucifixion.”

You must be eager to see where the paintings will go, how much more they might continue to change you as they also change.

It is more about how much further I can take it. The process of transformation has to happen intrinsically. Making art is ultimately about improving as a person. There is nothing more humbling than trying to make a great painting. You carry that into the world. In the same way meditation is transformative, painting is transformative. It changes you every day.

And sincerity seems crucial. It has to be a sincere transformation, or a sincere pursuit if you want to communicate more, and communicate better.

That’s right. For example, a lady I didn’t know came to the opening, and she cried while looking at the paintings.

She cried in front of your paintings? Broke down in tears?

Yes.

That’s wonderful!

I know.

The post “Je suis le tigre dans la montagne”: Marie Peter-Toltz in conversation with Paul D’Agostino appeared first on artcritical.

PAUL MAZIAR: Take us back to Buffalo in 2001 when Cuneiform Press began. As I understand it Robert Creeley, a key influence on your work, was there.

KYLE SCHLESINGER: Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Bob was and continues to be a huge influence on me on so many levels: the art of collaboration, poetry, poetics, grace, generosity, and a general ease of movement and insistent curiosity towards the world that is absolutely singular. He was the busiest guy in town, but when you sat down to talk he didn’t miss a beat, remembered everything, which taught me a lot about presence, giving your attention to whatever’s happening on a particular occasion.

Just before I left for Buffalo I had a stint teaching high school English in a mill town in northern Rhode Island. I was fine with the work, but a terrible disciplinarian; he suggested that I come up to Buffalo, get an advanced degree, and try teaching college, which is exactly what I’m doing now, 15 years later and a little bit grayer.

I started Cuneiform with the intention of publishing experimental work by emerging poets — very simple chapbooks by people like Patrick Durgin, whose Color Music (2002) has, to my mind, totally held up over the years. His wife’s brother made some punk collages on a photocopier and we printed the images on a Print Gocco, a little silkscreen kit that was briefly big in Japan. I’d throw a proof in Patrick’s mailbox at night, he’d make any corrections after dinner, then I’d go back to the press, make changes, and repeat for the next page.

I love the low-fi action that comes out of your printshop. The punk show posters you recently did look great. I’ve also seen Cuneiform’s phenomenal book by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, your call for musicians’ manuscripts for Cuneiform, and heard that you’re moving into a camper on a California beach, to surf and write a book about Bill Callahan.

The Sheff book is definitely the strangest thing I’ve done with Cuneiform. I emailed him, saying that I think his essays on music are the best since Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and that I’d like to collect them as a book.

He was very busy, but it occurred to me that books don’t always have to be published in large editions, that, as with book artists, sometimes just a copy or two can do the trick, that sometimes you make a book just because you want it to exist. So I tracked down every essay I could find, started copy-editing and fact-checking just like I would any other Cuneiform book, designed it, got it printed and bound by hand, the whole nine yards, sent him a copy and kept one for myself. Took about a year, a ridiculous amount of work, but it turned out perfect since many Okkervil River songs are about keeping it real, and the virtues of failing in a world with a conservative notion of success. That’s the first in this music series and others will follow, though they’ll be printed in standard editions, distributed properly, etc.

This failure virtue is part of what charms me about poets like Alfred Starr Hamilton. It seems to be something that we don’t find so often these days, do you agree? For instance, you took me to that Katherine Bradford exhibition in Portland, at Adams and Ollman; we were both pretty tickled by the show.

Every artist I talk to is in the same boat: how to make a living and make the art they want to make. Not just in the United States, but Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, and so on. Everyone’s wondering, maybe even a little nervous, how life can be more meaningful, but no one can say why… Or can they? The MFA and the National Endowment for the Arts killed art in America, which is why I can say that I feel a strong sense of connection to various artists of the last 40 years or so.

Lou Reed said something like, “There’s a door, and behind that door, is everyone you’ve ever wanted to meet. Then the door opens, and you stand there wondering, knowing that once the door closes, you can’t get out again.” And that’s the danger of monetary success, to my mind. Once you write a “Paul Maziar poem” you can’t write that poem again. Goodbye, Paul. The surplus of art versus the demand for art is at an all-time low, which leads us to an interesting question: Why do you want to do what you do when there’s really no social need or viable economic gain to be had? Is it personal happiness? I’m on board with that; I want everyone to do exactly what they want to do every day, all the time, but I also think that’s the real question we all must ask of ourselves, not specifically related to the day-in/day-out fact of our lives, but taking ourselves, as such, out of the equation.

I know that could sound pessimistic or jaded, but I don’t mean it to come across that way at all; it’s actually quite the opposite. The artist George Herms said, in a recent lecture I attended, “The single most important fact of my existence is that the population of the Earth has doubled since my birth.” I take the sentiment seriously, or as William Carlos Williams once remarked, “An empty space is the sign of a poor economy.” We’ve got a revolution going on, one with more talent and underutilized artistic resources than ever before. So let’s storm the fucking gates and build a world we want to live in, with history close to the heart.

I was charmed by that Creeley anecdote in The Art of Collaboration (Cuneiform, 2015), where he, having seen your letterpress printshop digs, asks why you haven’t gone all-digital, adding “If we had the internet in the fifties when we were editing the Black Mountain Review, we would never have done things this way.” It’s worth pointing out that you’re no extreme model-acolyte (you didn’t follow his line of thinking comme ça). Do you view art online or strictly in museums and galleries?

I keep a foot in both worlds. I teach classes on New Media Theory for a living, so I’m always reading up on the latest advances in technology. I think it’s something artists need to be aware of on multiple levels, but in terms of my personal practice, the more unplugged I am, the happier I am. It would never occur to me to look at art that has been reproduced digitally, nor am I partial to computer-generated art. On a recent trip to New York, I was happy to see a return to painting in the galleries I visited; no more projectors and flat-screen installations, and that’s something of a relief to me. I feel fortunate to have grown up with a typewriter and records, moved to CDs and word processors, and now I have a computer I use as strategically as possible. Mostly you’ll find me reading books, listening to records, and visiting as many artists in their studios and galleries as possible. The all-consuming pendulum of the digital age has hit its apex, at least in the art world, and for people younger than myself in particular: The tangible, sensual, real-time experience of creation is making a major comeback. The desire to get one’s hands dirty is an inexplicable fact of being.

How does your digital music listening experience stack up to your vinyl collection?

Being very much aware of the havoc corporations like Spotify have inflicted on the music industry, I’m adamant about the listener’s responsibility to support musicians because their livelihood is at risk. Needless to say, were so many musicians any less committed to their practice, we would live in a world of silence, barring only the most mainstream pop celebrities.

That said, I have a Spotify account and use it regularly to hear sounds I’ve never heard before; in that sense, it’s a practical tool to have. But if I like something, I’ll buy a ticket to the show, a record or two at my local shop or directly from the musician. It’s actually rather shocking, and saddening, to realize how popular one has to be to make a sustainable wage as a musician. If everyone at a concert threw in $10 into a tip jar, then that musician who just entertained you for a few hours might not have to get up the next morning to mow someone’s lawn or mop the floor of a brewery.

In 2006, Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer published What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985. What’s your idea of a good time?

Exactly.

The post Failure Virtue and Risky Poetry: Kyle Schlesinger with Paul Maziar appeared first on artcritical.

Fusco considers performances by artists such as Angel Delgado, El Sexto (Danilo Maldonado Machado), Sandra Ceballos, and collectives such as Omni Zona Franca, the Department of Public Interventions and Enema in light of how their work addresses the Cuban political context. While she discusses artistic censorship and the rules of conduct specific to the island, she compares Cuba’s situation with social and political restrictions in other contexts, including countries widely perceived as “free.” I recently spoke with Fusco about Dangerous Moves, and she expanded on these ideas and more.

LEE ANN NORMAN: In the book, you speak specifically about the unique political situation that gave rise to public performance practices in Cuba. Can you talk a bit more about that?

COCO FUSCO: I grew up during the Cold War, and at that time Fidel Castro was public enemy number one, spoken of publicly the way that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden are today. Every news story about Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s underscored that there was no freedom there. It’s true that political culture on the island is more centralized and authoritarian than in the US, but it’s also true that in the US, for all the rhetoric about freedom, the art world is run by a very small elite, and artists who do not produce work that is in fashion have a hard time securing a place for themselves professionally. Just because we don’t talk about this situation as representative of a lack of freedom, it doesn’t mean that there is no policing of culture here.

Right. I think as Americans, we tend to accept popular media narratives that show our society as the ideal liberal one, and everything else as repressive…

Americans don’t think about the rules of behavior that they conform to because they’re socialized not to see them. We do have very strong codes of conduct here, though. We tend to focus on controls relating to obscenity and sexuality, but think about social codes that are imposed in public spaces like shopping malls or schools. Let’s not forget the recent news story that went viral about Black women who visited a winery and were thrown off a train because they were laughing “too loudly,” whatever that means.

When looking at codes of conduct in Cuba, we have to understand the role they play in the shaping of political behavior. One of the articles of the Cuban penal code refers to social dangerousness, a term that includes public drunkenness and modes of behavior determined to run counter to socialist morality. There are Communist party officials and divisions within the Cuba police whose duty is to identity those engaging in these modes of conduct. There are also socially and politically unacceptable behaviors in the United States. The main difference is that in Cuba, power is centralized, which makes the repercussions for engaging in potentially criminal behavior more draconian. People operate with a clear sense of what is and what is not permitted. If they don’t know, someone will remind them very quickly.

How did performance emerge as a public action? What is that history in this context?

Performance produced self-consciously as art begins in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with a generation of young artists who wanted to shake things up. Their first forays were not so confrontational. Art students staged interventions in their classes because they felt the Soviet pedagogy being imposed on them was retrograde. Some of the artists who spearheaded the renaissance of the early 1980s in Cuba would stage performances privately for friends so they could experiment and not be interrupted. Some of their performances were about policing, state security, excessive bureaucratic control of culture, or the poor food that was being rationed to the population.

Things changed in the mid-’80s when artists such as Juan Sí González and Arte Calle (a group that tried to be clandestine but was “outed” very quickly) began creating street interventions without permission. The reactions varied. Some thought the work was too hot to handle. Others decried that it was not really art, but only a political provocation. There were other people who silently approved, but a sector of the art community expressed the fear that the more politically edgy artists were taking risks that would provoke negative reactions to young artists as a whole, and because of this they rejected their aesthetic proposals entirely.

How were these artists and their performances received? Were critics and historians dismissive, thinking of them like fame seekers?

Some art historians and critics were dismissive of those artists at the time, but I don’t think anyone was saying that they were seeking fame. That wasn’t the language being used. You don’t get famous in Cuba by getting arrested. Many of the artists faced negative judgment by their peers. State bureaucrats said they were provocateurs, but the worst accusation that could be levied against them was that they were “dissidents” because it meant they would lose any protections they might have as artists. Their work would be reconfigured as political provocation, and it is the police’s job to handle that. I remember the time when critics and curators ignored performance art in New York. The commercial art world thought it was a joke. I certainly wouldn’t single Cuba out as being more opposed to performance than other countries, but the centralization of power in the state is special. The Cuban state has the power to determine an artist’s life in a manner that is not very different from the way that the art market wields power over artists in the United States.

What changes, if any, have you seen in Cuban performance art now that the US and Cuba are re-engaging diplomatically?

The rapprochement between the governments of Cuba and the United States in the past year has not produced a change that would conform to any notion of liberalization. On the contrary, what we’ve seen in the last year has been a rise in the detention of people doing street actions. Cuban culture is changing, though, in two ways.

First, the Ministry of Culture is, like all state entities, losing much of its state funding. Administrators are being encouraged to seek alternative sources of financing. The cultural ministry is getting more involved in joint ventures with private investors, both Cuban and foreign. For example, La Fábrica in Havana, a hybrid nightclub, bar, and exhibition and performance space in an old factory, opened not that long ago. It’s a joint venture between the Ministry of Culture, music promoters, and local musicians. The bars are run by private entities, and local designers have display stands throughout. This kind of public-private endeavor is happening more and more in Cuba.

The pursuit of hard currency has completely transformed the Cuban art sector in the past 25 years. Events such as the Havana Biennial rely on money from tourists — not only for funding the event, but also because the back room sales of Cuban artworks allow many artists to live comfortably for months, even years after the exhibition. As the public sector shrinks and the value of Cuban salaries declines, artists become more dependent on the sale of their work. The Ministry of Culture continues to wield power as the broker between artists and foreign collectors, dealers and curators. There have been a lot of articles in foreign press recently suggesting that Cuba has a treasure trove of great cheap art, so this is the moment for foreign collectors to get in and invest. That actually drove a lot of people to go to the last Havana Biennial. What we’re talking about here is economic change, not political change.

Fusco, Coco. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. (London: Tate, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-1849763264, 192 pages, $27.8

The post The State and the Studio: Coco Fusco on Performance Art in Cuba appeared first on artcritical.

NOAH DILLON: You had considered two different paintings: one was a portrait, and although there’s descriptive information there and signifiers that you can read, this other scene has an interior space and an exterior landscape and several people interacting. How would you describe it?

HIBA SCHAHBAZ: This painting is very beautiful and complex and has a rich cultural narrative. It’s an illustration from the Shahnameh, the “Book of Kings,” which is an epic Persian poem consisting of over 50,000 rhyming couplets. It was customary for kings to commission a copy of the Shahnameh which was compiled by the best calligraphers and miniaturists.

What drew you to look at this in particular? There are several miniatures here to choose from, including other moments in this narrative. I wonder if it’s the narrative, the history of the piece, the formal qualities of this particular painting, or something else.

I think it’s a mixture of all those things. The story is interesting and the image is beautiful. When I was looking for a painting to talk about, I wanted to choose one that had all the signifiers of Islamic art and this has pretty much all of them. It has calligraphy, geometry, floral arabesques, figuration; it even has a little horse in there. I also like it because of the way it’s been framed, with a frame within a frame within a frame: you have the outside on the inside and everyone’s kind of on the same plane. And it has a flattened perspective, which is prevalent in miniature painting.

I tend to gravitate toward work that I find visually appealing. The other painting we looked at before, a portrait called Shah Jahan on Horseback (ca. 1628–58), I chose for emotional reasons. I love that painting. It has a sister painting here, in the Met, which is usually on display but isn’t at the moment. It’s a painting of Shah Jahan in a pink tunic, one of the first paintings I copied when training as a miniaturist.

Are there formal qualities in this that you find especially interesting — things you don’t see in the ones nearby? You mentioned the arabesques and the calligraphy, the figures and how they’re arranged in space to convey a sense of movement through time and place, and then there’s the geometric patterning that has flattened out certain areas.

I’m interested in the intricate patterns in this painting, and how these patterns are placed side by side but don’t compete with each other. There are so many colors and varied geometries, yet everything fits together and flows harmoniously. The peripheral figures in the paintings frame the two main figures, Mihrab and Sindukht. And the white wall behind them forms a sort of a halo and emphasizes them at the same time. It’s a very complex and elegant way of framing a domestic dispute.

The narrative is also very intriguing. Mihrab is angry at the woman next to him, his wife, Sindukht, because he found out that his daughter, Rudaba, is in love with Zal, a warrior who was not her chosen husband. I’m really intrigued with the way that Rudaba and Zal met. She had heard about what a great warrior he was, and he had heard about how beautiful she was. When they met, she let down her very long hair in a Rapunzel sort of scene. And then they sat together and they talked.

You are interested in conflict, it seems, and the narrative complexity that comes with it. 

I’m interested in complicated romance and cultural drama. Which is found in a lot of epic stories. There are several paintings in this room telling the tale of Layla and Majnun, which is a story about unrequited love. I would say they have very similar cultural connotations to this painting.

Visually, there’s a lot going on. I wouldn’t necessarily paint this sort of painting anymore myself, but when I was learning to paint, copying images, trying to understand the patterns and arabesques and making the tiny little figures was something I was obsessed with.

One of the things I’m interested in is that you’ve picked out this Iranian painting and the other Mughal portrait — two very different cultures. You’re from Pakistan, but you’re immersed in miniatures’ broad and deep well of stories and iconography, which spans a large geographic area and a lot of time.

Well, both paintings were produced during the height of their respective traditions. They are both categorised here under Islamic Art. I guess I feel drawn to both of them because the training that I received was very broad and encompassed more than merely one school of miniature painting. I feel connected to the height of Mughal and Persian painting, which produced very refined works. I like the polish of these works. And the colors and geometry and the way they flow together to create a strange, harmonious balance.

Are there particular colors here that you find especially attractive or that make their way into your own work?

I’m really attracted to the blues in traditional miniatures and I’m always trying to replicate them in my own work. I love the different ways that gold is used as well. I suppose I use a lot of gold in my work, too.

You’ve also been playing with brown in your work recently, with your use of tea. Yours is much more expressive, but I think there’s a real affinity there.

There are three traditional disciplines in miniature; partial color (which can be tea or sepia), opaque watercolor (full color), and sia kalam (black pen). When I arrived in New York, I got really interested in color. I was trying to be more colorful, not just in painting, but as a person too. It was a challenge and I wanted to work with every color I could think of and make. However, these last couple of years I’ve found myself revisiting the partial color technique and getting very involved in it. Painting with tea comes very naturally to me and I’m really enjoying exploring its possibilities.

Is there something particular about seeing it in this space — surrounded by these other works, and with chairs and the particularities of the Met — do you think that something about that comes into your perception of the painting?

The Islamic wing at the Met re-opened soon after I moved to New York, and it was so exciting for me to visit it. I’ve seen and copied a lot of miniatures from books and I had a master teaching me how to paint, but there was something magical about standing in front of an ancient miniature painting. I think during my first visit to the Met, I also saw a Klimt and started crying because it was my first time seeing his work in real life. So it was very meaningful to see paintings that I had only ever seen before in books.

Is there a way that seeing this in New York, in the context of moving here and going to school, colors the way you experience them, think about them, or the way they come into your own work?

It’s possible. Although I think that when I start looking at a painting I forget about my environment, instead wondering “What is that? How was it made?” When I look at a miniature, I see it as a miniaturist. An abstract painter probably sees an abstract painting in a way that I don’t understand. But when I look at this, I instinctively understand it. I can see how it’s made. I can resolve my own work by looking at it and seeing different things that I can take into my practice. The painting becomes the teacher. The Islamic wing of the Met also feels like a safe haven, like home away from home.

Well, this is from a book, but this is not at all a book: it’s been taken out, a single page, with matting, on display, behind glass, and so on. And I just wonder if that changes things.

When my own work goes from my studio to the gallery, the work is taken out of its context. It’s a small shift, but it’s important. It feels different, is arranged differently, and there’s the continuing possibility that you can keep rearranging it and make a million narratives. As an artist, I can take my own work and turn it into a giant pudding. And anything an artist does can and will be taken out of context, right?

Yeah, probably. I think you release it out into the world and everyone else has to deal with it in ways that are beyond your control. You’re doing something very different from what these artists did. They’re painting kings and illustrating epic stories. My understanding of this art form is extremely limited, but I can’t remember ever seeing a self-portrait, or a seeing a woman self portraitist more specifically.

Well, back in the day miniaturists had patrons. These patrons were often kings who commissioned court paintings. There’s very little self-portraiture, but it’s not unprecedented. Some of the more favored male court painters would include little portraits of themselves, in the border of the painting, for instance. Otherwise there were just portraits of important people. There were portraits of women, but these were not self-portraits. Sometimes portraits of women were specifically commissioned. For instance if X was going to marry Y, they’d send her portrait over so that he could see her.

There’s also more explicit eroticism in your work, and what I read as its feminism. I wonder about this image and its encoding of the social roles of men and women and how they find their way from here to your studio.

There’s a great erotic painting called Pleasures of the Hunt on display right now. It’s part of the “The Royal Hunt” exhibit and it shows a man making love to a woman while hunting a tiger.

This work was an attempt to document the time in which it was made and my work deals with something happening now. Even though I was trained as a traditional miniaturist, I’ve always worked with the female body. My painting process is very intuitive. It’s natural for me to paint whatever I’m feeling or thinking.

Is there any other fundamental aspect of this painting that we’ve missed?

This painting is so tiny, but I feel very vast. It’s multi layered. There’s a foreground, spaces at the sides, a background, views through the windows, of the sky, hints of the clouds. There are nearly a dozen figures in this painting and multiple rugs, calligraphy… There’s so much information here that even though it’s a miniature and it’s small, it’s also, for me, very large. I like that aspect of it. There’s a flattening of perspective and a lot of subtle details and cultural signifiers which come together to tell a story. When I look at it, at first I’m absorbed in all the separate colors and intricate patterns. But when I look into it, I begin to see the interactions between the figures and the figures within the space. And my mind begins to put together all the little details which create this monumental scene.

Hiba Schahbaz is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in the centuries-old art form of miniature painting. She trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and received an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York City. In addition to exhibiting her work internationally in galleries and fairs including the Vienna Art Fair and Scope NYC, Schahbaz has curated exhibitions of miniature paintings in Pakistan and India. She was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and The Wassaic Project and has taught miniature painting as part of the Alfred Z. Solomon Residency at the Tang Museum. She is a teaching artist at the Art Students League of New York.

The post Tell Me: with Hiba Schahbaz appeared first on artcritical.

JESSICA HOLMES: Can you tell me something about the body of work in this show? Is there anything viewers might find surprising? 

BILLY CHILDISH: The paintings have been made over the last six months, so they’re very current. They are of subjects that have presented themselves and that I’ve worked through, or am still working through. People tend to have quite a lot of expectation, based on whether they are familiar with an artist or if they have ideas based on various misinformations that are available. Some people are surprised that I would work with the nudes. I painted nudes a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s and I haven’t painted them for the last five years or so — I think surprises are all down to expectations and knowledge.

I’d say that your paintings are deceptive because at first glance they are very straightforward, but there is great mystery once you really start looking. You frequently paint the natural world.

The natural world is a vibrating mystery of continual becoming and unbecoming. Within my paintings the bits that interest me are the abstracted parts. If I went round these pictures I’d say, “I like that bit.” It’s a love, an expression of my love of nature and an intense relationship with matter — vibrating, distorting matter, which is timeless and unable to be fixed in time.

I was going to ask you, since your work is so personal, how you feel when it’s released into the world, but maybe this is something that allows you to let it go.

My relationship with the art is making the picture and once that’s done, I don’t have much of a relationship afterwards. I’m not necessarily happy with my paintings when they’re finished. People hear my disregard for art and artists and they think I’m very satisfied with what I do. Not necessarily.

Does an idea ever morph into something else? Do you ever think you are going to make a painting and it becomes a poem, for example?

No, I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I paint on particular days of the week and I write poems in my notebook. I was in a British art show in the 1990s and they had some poems of mine painted on a wall, which is not something I would do, or which I considered to be art. And I said, “Well, I know what they are. They’re poems written on a wall.” I don’t see breaking down in categories as a freedom, I see it more as nonsense. There is nothing wrong with a poem being a poem. It doesn’t need to become a painting. I like all of my courses separate, so I don’t put my custard in with the roast beef. Not because I don’t like custard or I don’t like roast beef but because I do like custard and I do like roast beef.

Do you prefer painting to the other media?

Yes, it’s my natural ground. I’ve got works existing from when I was four or five, and I painted a great deal starting from when I was 12. I couldn’t really read and write until I was 14 [because of undiagnosed dyslexia], and I wasn’t involved with music until I was 17. Of all the other things, painting is the one where I don’t have those on/off buttons. I paint every Monday and Sunday, so I know what I am meant to be doing when I’m doing it. I had to discipline myself after I was expelled from art school, which fits my nature quite nicely. Going to art school doesn’t suit creative types.

Since you brought up your art school experience, which from what I understand was terrible, what would you say to somebody thinking of going to art school today, when there is so much emphasis placed on receiving an MFA?

When I went to art school, it wasn’t like the pressure now. Art schools these days seem to be there to try and create artists quickly, whereas I think an art school’s job is to give people stuff for their tool kit. I see it as much more craft-based or space-based. You’ve got to have quite a lot of self-will not to be run all over, or have them get rid of your real primal interests and send you on the course to being an Identi-Kit conceptual artist. What you need are the tools to actualize your vision. I’d say it might be better to be wary, ask questions, maybe not be like I was, and rather keep a bit of a low profile. I just fought with them.

What were some of the things you were made to do at St. Martin’s?

I had not been taught the type of obedience that they thought they should receive from someone as lowly as a student. I was required to take history of art and I found the person who taught it dull. You had to say things about canvas, or about art, using “art speak.” I told them I wouldn’t go, and they said I could sleep in that class if I wanted to, but I must attend it. I also refused to paint pictures at the college; I painted at home instead. I told them I didn’t want to become contaminated. I got into a lot trouble for writing what they called obscene poetry. I was talented and charismatic, which caused me more problems than if I hadn’t been. I was a good target.

You’ve stuck remarkably with your vision. How has that been beneficial, and how has it hindered you?

I think it’s in line with my nature, and it’s not an effort. I paint the pictures and, after the event, find out what psychological drive might be in there, which is far more interesting than having a prescriptive one. I just let it happen and then people can work out what fruitcake I am afterwards.

Or not!

Or not! Thank you!

[Laughter]

The thing is, there’s not many great thinkers in art. You have a few people like Picasso who always said smart stuff but you’re not going to get much intellectual stimulation from talking to artists. You can see how popular that opinion will make me! A curator asked me yesterday what I thought art was about, and I came up with a quote, and we wrote it down because I got the giggles. It was, “art is pornography and comfort food for the spiritually inept.” That doesn’t mean that’s true; that was yesterday’s definition!

Right! And what did she say?

She was in stitches!

[Laughter] 

Over the years you’ve used different names and pseudonyms. Do they represent different personalities?

In 1977, when I was 17, I was a punk rocker. I got the moniker Billy Childish from a friend of mine, which I used in bands. I didn’t like using that name in other areas so I always painted — and still paint — under my family name, William Hamper. When I was doing early exhibitions in German cooperatives, they knew I played music as Billy Childish, and it was forced onto me as a painter. Billy Childish has never made any paintings. Well, very rarely. When I was making films, I would use William Loveday. I was trying to compartmentalize so that I couldn’t be accused of trading off Billy Childish, a musician who now paints. It was self-preservation to stop people from categorizing me, but it didn’t work at all. 

I would love to hear you talk about your philosophy of Radical Traditionalism.

With Radical Tradition what I was trying to get across is that tradition, which I really like, is freeing because it is something you don’t have to invent. There’s this literal relationship with a history of painting, which used to be recognized and respected by artists as obvious. 

It’s a connection with antiquity in a way, right?

Yes. Nothing is as dated as the contemporary. Modern people want to lift the ego, but the ego is a block to creativity. Tradition is a way of subjugating the ego and allowing the thing to flow. Great artists, like Van Gogh for instance, wear their hearts on their sleeves. Van Gogh says whom he loves, and you can see whom he loves in his paintings. There’s no desperation for authorship. Really great art has got a timeless quality and it’s not narrow. You look at Van Gogh’s work, it looks contemporary, and it doesn’t look like it’s made in a mechanized age, either. When you are trying to be contemporary or relevant, to show us who we are, it’s like a rupture in time whereas if you give yourself to a tradition you dissolve time. With my music, we used to be pawned off as revivalists in the 1980s for playing guitar music and rock-‘n’-roll. Now people listen and say, “Your music doesn’t sound like any time at all.” That is what you want, for that thing to have a continued, timeless presence.

It’s got a life force.

Yeah. There’s still fight to it.

The post “The natural world is a vibrating mystery”: Billy Childish with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.

“ONGOING DISTANT ROARS DOWN THROUGH FOREST ON FOOTPATH,

CLOSED CABIN, EDELWEISS IN LOG PLANTER, COLD SHADE”

The following conversation took place in playful and casual bursts over email between Brooklyn and Stockholm, mostly from August 18, 2015 through August 20, 2015.

EMMALEA RUSSO: Your work makes me think about the importance of place. Where are you now? What’s it like there?

HELEN MIRRA: I’m in Sweden, though only for 10 days. The August light is friendly — clear and soft, and in Tyresta National Park, lake-swimming is bright, cool, and blueberries and mushrooms are rampant.

Much of your work is process-based and comes out of walking and/or being outside — a “paced printmaking” as you’ve called it. How did this shift to the outside happen?

For seemingly a long while I had been making work about the idea of the outside, without spending much time there. A series of opportunities shifted me out, maybe starting with a year I had a residency in Berlin, with a studio in the forest on the edge of the city It crystallized during another residency year in Basel, when I was given an office rather than a studio to work in — a problem I resolved by deciding to spend the time mostly walking in the mountains, collecting rocks. That being a total pleasure; I knew I wanted to stay outside, and found a strategy for how to do that. There were a few years when the works were all a kind of printmaking. Then it drifted into other forms.

How has the work changed — how are the objects different — making work about the idea of the outside versus being actually outside while making/collecting?

Only at first it was collecting — or, better, borrowing, as I returned most of the rocks to the mountains a few years after I had taken them. When walking became central, in its moving-center kind of way, I became less attached to the so-called work, and these days it feels more like it makes itself, and I assist.

I read an interview where you described yourself as a “careful amateur.” I think of this term often and I like the vastness of it, especially in a time so concerned with specialization and expertise. How does being a careful amateur fit your work and life? What are the benefits and drawbacks?

That’s funny: I think now I’d more say a brazen amateur, trying to be less cautious. “Not-knowing is most intimate.” So much more is available when one is not focused-on, not buttoned-up. So-called mistakes are constant, and no cause for distress; the aim is simply for one’s mistakes to be harmless. Once one is really mostly practicing being a beginner, everything is easier — frustrations still come up but are briefer in duration and easier to set aside, or to flip into curiosity, and approach.

How is a walk in the city different from a walk in the country? Do you have a preference?

It has taken me a while to embrace walking in the city, and it was practicing half-smiling, as described by Thich Nhat Hanh, that has allowed me to. Cities have the disadvantage of concrete and cars, and the advantage of discernible responses to practicing half-smiling. Forests are still the easiest for me: the changing surfaces underfoot, the moving light, the multitude of sounds high and low, near and far, the palpable diversity of species, the distinctions between a wet and a dry forest, in smell and color and the feeling of the air. Mountains are the most eccentric, and object-related.

Where and how do you prefer to spend your time?

I mostly try to drop preferences about where I am, and just be where I am. Still, I do feel most in my element when walking, especially in unmanaged green space, without any need to get anywhere particular, and while standing weaving, alternating balancing on one foot and the other. There are substantial pleasures of being somewhere I altogether or mostly can’t understand the language. This is an obvious kind of not-knowing, when there is nothing to do but pay attention to small gestures and expressions. I’m content in a hammock, particularly the one in our backyard next to where we buried our longtime cat-friend, Maclow.

You have a book called Edge Habitat Materials (2014). I think of walking as an edge practice. How do you think of edges? Who are the artists/people/thinkers who engage edge-space in ways that inform your work, or feel compelling?

I think of the edge being where one thing turns into another, turns inside out, upside down, where synesthesia happens — what happens in translation or communication, looking for and not finding the exactly right word. Of course a classic edge is the one between the familiar and unfamiliar. I think the edge habitat is the territory of André Cadere and Ad Reinhardt, both keystone artists for me. Percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. Translation work of Basho by Kazuaki Tanahashi and of Chinese Buddhist writings by Bill Porter (The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, 2014), Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Forgetting is a great edge.

You have a solo exhibition that opened August 20th in Stockholm. Could you talk a little about the work in the show and the process of making it?

I’ve been weaving on a large triangle loom, with the hypotenuse set at 180, 215, or 240 cm. Each weaving has wool from two black sheep — changing from one to the other halfway through. Three blacks appear: two from the individual sheep, one of their admixture. These three blacks are barely differentiated one from another but for a delimiting colored strand, dyed from foraged mushrooms, drawn through each work. Each inexact triangle is doubled over a cedar support, or folded into an even smaller floor sculpture.

In the fall, I saw your show in New York at Peter Freeman and found myself getting very close to those woven triangles, noticing the different strands of color. Those invited very close looking. I feel this way about much of your work. For example the Quarry works (2007) — small sculptures made with folded pieces of clothing, each with a rock perched on top. I find that these and the triangles ask for a certain kind of hovering and closeness — certainly evoking Dogen’s “not-knowing is most intimate.” Can you say more about the connection between not-knowing and your practice? Zen teachings and your practice?

Hovering is a good word — the aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity — which is one of the ways I think of not-knowing. Like the outdoors and walking going from the theoretical to the actual, it has been the same for me with so-called secular Buddhist philosophy — while I was intellectually engaged with it when I was younger, now I’d say I’m an adherent.

The “aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity” is lovely. It makes me wonder about the ways you’re encountering the outside — the “unmanaged green space” — and how that might relate to the ways in which viewers encounter your work in a gallery.

It’s like walking all day in rain and then coming inside and changing into dry clothes, or sleeping and awake, or vice versa. A gallery is a temporary minimalist habitat, and sort of like an animal shelter. I’m largely in agreement with Rémy Zaugg’s charge for ideal exhibition spaces (his 1986 lecture was recently translated and published: The Art Museum of My Dreams, or, A Place for the Work and the Human Being) and it is a reminder of why, how, they can be worthwhile. Maybe an examined life is best led outdoors, constantly reminded of its interdependence, and the exhibition space is a useful temporary fiction of autonomy for artworks, for another kind of attending to.

What’s next?

Referential weaving experiments, for a pair of shows in Berlin in January with Allyson Strafella. In one space we will show works of ours from 15 to 20 years ago, that we think of as connecting from there to where we are now. In the other, we will show new works, which we consider as reiterations or paraphrases, replies or responses, to each other’s particular existing works (which might or might not be included in the early-work show). Allyson is making typewriter drawings, and I’m making tapestry weavings. We both have very particular limitations, in color for instance, because of the materials we are using (typewriter ink, carbon paper/un-dyed and plant- or mushroom-dyed yarns), and size by the respective widths of typewriter platens and loom warps.

The post “Not-knowing is most intimate”: Helen Mirra in Conversation with Emmalea Russo appeared first on artcritical.

JAY SANDERS: When did you meet Jack?

FELIX BERNSTEIN: Well, I was really young, and Jack, at the end, nobody really liked him, I would just hang out on the lower east side, I was a poser, I wasn’t an artist, I wasn’t really interested in culture, I just found the lower east side a compelling place to experience things.

I would pick up guys, I would cruise, basically one of the guys was Jack, and he had all these punk neo-Nazis hanging around with him. Ludlum was over, and the Club Kids were a mess, and Jack was really generous, and I wouldn’t be an artist or anything if it weren’t for his generosity. He would tell me to meet him for a rendezvous or whatever, but he wouldn’t even show up. But that taught me a lot. Him not giving me attention made me show up in wilder and wilder costumes. I was called a child prostitute, but I wouldn’t think of myself as that, but as a rebel. We had a lot of encounters where we wouldn’t talk. He would give just little statements, not positive or negative, that just pushed me along. I think of that as generous. Pina Bausch, or someone like that, is very hands on, obviously…. Jack wasn’t even there. It was a teaching in absence.

Was it difficult?

Yeah cause you’re put on the spot and there’s no one there for you. His father died when he was very young, in a sea accident.

I don’t want to say I came into my own because he didn’t want me to come into my own. I wasn’t self-possessed; I didn’t have a self, and he took that material and used it.

Anyone who evaluated him was ascribed as a monster, patriarchal, crazy. I grew up in a world where there was no evaluation. You can imagine that having a teacher like that wasn’t an easy situation. He wasn’t evaluated and didn’t evaluate me, but I learned from him to evaluate others. But nowadays, German art magazines pay me to say the sort of stuff Jack Smith said. They love to see me bite the hand that feeds.

What about ideas? Did he have any ideas?

His ideas were already out there, and people used them all the time. When I was on St. Marks Place I was bored, cause everyone wanted to be Jack, and I didn’t. I didn’t want anything to do with him, and I think that’s why he found me.

I had no diva worship for Jack, and I don’t like Jack and I don’t like who you think he is. To put it cutely, You Don’t Know Jack, and that was the space of our interaction. I’m not gonna dress up as a Flaming Creature and dance around Barbara Gladstone gallery or at a Pride parade. He would hate that. In fact, I’ll let you know: he hates you, if you do that. And if you say performance art is subversive in a museum, he’ll kill you.

Did you ever have sex?

The phallus is an organ belonging to the father, and Jack’s father was dead but he didn’t care. Jack had no phallus: he hated phallic men. He just had a flaccid penis, hanging around all the time. That’s what’s so “obscene” about his film Flaming Creatures; there are no erections.

Jack was at that weird time: the birth of pop art. Like Warhol, he didn’t want to be a subject; he wanted to be an object. But unlike Warhol, he didn’t want to be a commodity, even though he loved the world of commodities—Maria Montez and the starlets. But Smith liked being the pivot between subject and object. He couldn’t settle on one or the other, and it drove him. Most of us pick. He wouldn’t. He was neither Batman, the hero, the free agent or Dracula, the bloodsucking villain (he played both in his one filmic collaboration with Warhol)—it’s clear that Warhol chose to be a vampire, an undead object who fed off of the lives of subjects.

What did he invent?

Everyone in Greek Theatre knows what this look means. He didn’t splinter the disclosure of thinking but some people think he did. But he wasn’t expressive. It wasn’t about the outpouring of emotion. The beauty of Smith’s Hamlet is that emotion is rendered through objective correlatives, and it connects you to the subject through a skewed view. You directly feel it through indirection, as T.S. Eliot has explained of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Nowadays all intimacy is delayed through parody and irony…but for Smith there was no deferral. The indirect was always already directed at the viewer. It was an instantaneous transferal through spontaneous yet effective bodily hieroglyphics.

Famed experimental artist Tony Conrad was originally Smith’s intern. Of course, Conrad is a straight, minimal artist. Conrad was using drugs to control his emotions: to go from happy to sad, the two faces of theatre—all very simple, controlled, framed. Jack Smith, Conrad thought, was so corny and emotional. And this helped him reduce emotions to stark symbols. Maximalism became minimalism. In turn, it is true that Smith invented minimalism. And he turned away from Kant’s subjectivism towards a new paradigm: the subject-as-object or the subject as thing. 

For someone like Jack Smith, what’s the boundary of an artwork?

To be or not to be, to be art or not to be art, hard or soft dick, wavering, stuck in wavering, because phallic authority is dead. That lack of resolution became what others manufactured in their attempts to claim his legacy. Even Warhol.

Jack Smith didn’t hate all proper names. He always hated the one, who led the chain gang of signification: Jonas Mekas, that was the master signifier he abhorred. Smith was always playing the crazy polymorphous signified. That was Jack Smith, or Jack Smith was that thing. Mekas uses his subjectivity to interpellate and determine, Smith was always the interpellated thing. Young performance artists and queer academics always say with a smile, “that was Jack Smith.” But perhaps the “that” that was Jack is really just the stab in the back caused by the reclusive and elusive referent. So it is not wrong when everyone says “that was Jack Smith,” the one who sent me that strange and hostile letter. That was him since he was always that thing, and we were always determining him through such anecdotes.

We’ve talked about the reptilian technique. How did Jack Smith convey his own technique?

Interns became baroque apprentices. You can never master baroque art but you can at least be told about it. The student can never be more than a subjective creature; only he was ever really an object; and so he remained better than us. We would decorate or be “flaming,” he would watch us then morph based on what he saw us seeing. Like Warhol, he was a voyeur not a “flaming” participant, like the modern gay/queer artist. But unlike Warhol, he would become what he watched the watcher watching. Thus, Warhol’s cruel glare was more than just a subjective standpoint for Smith—but rather, it was also an internalized compass for designing selfhood.

What do you think about his legacy?

John Waters said about Jack Smith: that he bit the hand that fed him. He’s wrong. Jack Smith was never even fed. Rather, he fed the hand that bit him. Not to over-emphasize the point, but Jack Smith’s dad died at sea. He was untreatable and unfeedable, because you cannot treat someone who does not accept, as an ontological premise, the supplement of health—he was the living embodiment of what Richard Foreman termed the Ontological Hysterical Theater.

Can Smith be anything more than a dodo? What does Jack Smith mean for productivity?

Plenty of people will say, Jack Smith is a real artist, but Rent the musical is superficial. They are wrong. Gay Marriage is neoliberal fantasy and so is Rent but your critique is just as neoliberal. Protesting gentrification is gentrification. Jack wouldn’t have cared about Rent: it would’ve been as good as anything else. Idina Menzel might even be our Maria Montez.

Funny story—a budding hip gay artist blocked me from all his social media accounts after I wrote a critique of his safe aesthetics—an hour later, he shared a glossy ArtForum essay that praised Jack Smith for being an aggressive trailblazer. “Never conform,” he tweeted as a caption. Jack Smith is rolling in his grave. Or anyway, Jack Smith is the thing that rolls in a grave.

Bieber Bathos Elegy will be presented in the Whitney Museum’s theater on January 15th & 16th at 9PM. Advanced tickets will be available. More information is forthcoming.

(Transcription by Julien Nguyun)

The post J.S. (Je Suis/Jack Smith) appeared first on artcritical.